shell around the soft centre of shyness.
I was not then much interested in politics but my experiences had shaped my response to the political wars already raging in what we called “civvy street.” Many of my shipmates were from the working class in regions of Britain where the Labour Party and the dream of socialism were strong, the sort of people who would never have been my friends in peacetime. And the sharp division in the navy between officers and men — far sharper, I think, than in the army or the air force — made me resentful of the sort of class distinction between bosses and workers that I might have accepted as natural in civilian life. The landmark election of July 1945 had occurred while I was still in some remote corner of the Pacific, and it had made little impact on me. I was too young to vote anyway, but I remember that the petty officers, conservative to a man, were deeply concerned that the Labour Party might win and bring their familiar and hierarchical society crashing down.
The Labour Party had helped to make Churchill prime minister, and faithfully supported his national government. But with the war in Europe won, it withdrew from the coalition, forcing an election. At once, ferocious party warfare resumed, and Churchill contributed with an extraordinary attack on the Labour leaders, many of whom had served in his Cabinet: They would, he charged, if elected, introduce “some form of Gestapo” to enforce their plans, and their socialism would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. The press also resumed the prewar party warfare with most national dailies supporting the Conservatives, but Labour won in a landslide, despite Churchill’s immense personal popularity. The vote, I think, was essentially a vote for the values that had been established during the war, for fair shares instead of class and privilege, for a planned and directed economy that would guarantee full employment instead of relying on a market that had in the 1930s produced massive unemployment; in short for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a.k.a. socialism. The war had shown what government could achieve in organizing the national resources of labour and materials, and now we could set about building that famous land fit for heroes. To the extent that it was a negative vote, it was not against Churchill, but against the Tory party which was held to blame for the prewar depression, the years of appeasing Hitler, and for leading the country into war so ill-prepared that we came to the brink of defeat and disaster.
I shared those values and ideas, so when the time came to choose sides in the postwar political wars, I chose Labour. That displeased my father, a typical-middle class Conservative with no confidence at all in the ability of the working class to govern itself, let alone its betters. When the august Times newspaper, which sold for three pence when other dailies cost a penny, supported the Labour government in its early days — as in fact it thought proper to support all new governments — the businessmen’s club to which my father belonged declared it to be a mere “threepenny Daily Worker,” the Worker, of course, being the Communist daily. Indeed, any hope that the wartime spirit might continue was soon shown to be hopelessly naive. Nevertheless, having found my political home — what we now call social democracy — all those years ago, I have never seen cause to change. It seems undeniable to me that democratic government is the best, perhaps the only, agency through which ordinary people can hope to make progress against capital and privilege. By progress I do not mean merely higher incomes, but fuller and more equal participation in a society that raises the quality of life along with the quantity of goods and services we are able to buy. This does not mean I have always supported a party calling itself social democratic. In Canada I have voted for the CCF/NDP, the Liberals, and the Conservatives when that seemed the best way to advance social democratic ideas. The war years did not make me, but they shaped the attitudes I carried into journalism.
A WORKING JOURNALIST
~ Chapter 4 ~
Funerals, Fleet Street, Family Man
Having laid my genes, nurture and experiences as a youth face up on the page, as it were, I can now begin the substance of this memoir, which is my life and good times as a journalist. When I left school in 1941, at age fifteen, my father explained that there was no money for further education — my brother had been at a boarding school until he was seventeen — and when I said I would like to be a reporter he might well have objected because in those days it was not really a career for a middle-class boy in Britain. There were basically three ways into the business: As an inky copy boy of fourteen hoping to get a chance to move up to reporting; as an apprentice training to be a reporter; or by way of Oxford or Cambridge and family connections for the few chosen to be editorial writers or foreign correspondents on a major paper. The fact that there were apprentices and unions revealed that it was a trade or craft rather than a respectable profession like law or medicine or accounting. In fact, the newsrooms of most papers were “closed shops,” meaning that you couldn’t work there unless you were a member of the National Union of Journalists. The phrase “gentlemen of the press” was intended ironically because reporters were mainly from the lower middle or working classes and certainly not gentlemen in the sense of class. Except for a few stars, they were poorly paid, and the pub was their club. As one cynical poet put it:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Nevertheless, my father arranged for me to have an interview with the formidable lady who was a part-owner — the other owners being a London-based chain — of the local afternoon paper, the Express & Echo. She agreed the paper would take me on as an apprentice for five years, not, I suspect, because I was such a promising lad but because there was a manpower, even a boypower, shortage, in the war years. Terms of apprenticeship, or indentures, varied in the different trades and crafts. Under some, in the nineteenth century, the apprentice’s parents paid for his training and upkeep by his master, and others which I came across during my family research forbade dancing, drinking, fornication, even marriage. Of course, it wasn’t that strict for me, although under the union agreement, apprentices started out at a few shillings a week — perhaps $20 in today’s money. And there wasn’t much training because most of the senior reporters were away at the war, and those who remained were old or unfit. We did have an able “district man” who covered rural affairs, but he had the bulbous nose of a drinker, and when he came into the office he often carried a fishing rod and had a collection of flies in his hat. He was not above borrowing a few shillings from a junior if he could, and had a beguiling way of asking: “Would you care to increase my indebtedness to you?”
The paper’s building was in no better shape than the staff. The exterior was black oak Tudor, and the interior a warren of corridors and offices, some of which were braced by two-by-fours, no doubt because when the presses ran the whole place shook. Here, the week after my sixteenth birthday, I joined two other apprentices who, like me, were waiting to enter the forces, and being older left before I did. We worked in what was called the junior reporters’ room, and the chief reporter had a cubicle in the corner. We were required to learn shorthand and typing in our own time, which meant evening classes at a secretarial school. I had no trouble with typing, or rather, I soon learned to type very fast with two fingers, as I am doing now. But my handwriting had always been messy — now it is illegible even to me, unless I print — and I never did learn to write neat shorthand outlines, correctly positioned on the line. I lived in dread of the occasional days when the chief reporter would call one of us into his cubicle and dictate the leading editorial from The Times or The Daily Telegraph which we would then have to read back from our shorthand notes. I survived by reading the editorials every day and memorizing enough to help me over illegible words and sentences in my shorthand.
To emphasize the importance of shorthand, the chief reporter, a kindly old gent we referred to behind his back as Father, liked to tell us the cautionary story — quite true, he insisted — of the young reporter who had the misfortune to be in the assize court in the
